My husband has a pair of glasses that he wears for mere minutes every day, but that he always has tabs on. Lo' -- they move around the house a fair bit -- sometimes they're in the medicine cabinet (the third shelf, over on the right), other times by the side of the bed (his side, just to the right of the lamp base and on top of whatever book he's currently reading) -- but they are, so to speak, always within his sights.

That's because without his contact lenses he's as good as blind. When he wakes up in the morning (or in the middle of the night, which happens a fair bit now that we've got a toddler), he's sightless until his groping hand fastens around those frames.

We've lived together for some time now, and in that time I've learned not to move his things, not even an inch. Not only those glasses, but any object that he relies on, like his cell phone. He long ago explained to me that as a nearly blind child with a perpetually evolving prescription, he adapted by developing systems for locating his things without the boost of contacts or spectacles. Once he decided where he was going to keep an object (today: iPod; then: favorite Star Wars action figure), he stuck to it with a tenacity that cannot be appreciated by those of us with 20/20.

I do appreciate it now though. I am the kind of person who is forever wondering where her keys are. Yes, I have a place for them (there's a key rack integrated into our landing strip), but do I always put them there upon returning home? No.

With The Child's recently acquired hobby of moving household objects around randomly, however, I have finally decided to take a page from the blind. Not just by making a place for everything, but by religiously putting everything back in its place, all the time.